Awards and rewards

Mawson's Commander of the Order of the British Empire medal.

The Home of the Blizzard was published in Britain in March 1915 to some very positive reviews in the London press. ‘One of the most fascinating accounts… that… polar travel has ever inspired’, said the Sunday Times. The Morning Post was even more effusive:

…one of the world’s greatest stories of adventure… an intensely interesting and a fabulously true story. A strange, masterful book… It is the best written account of Antarctic exploration we have ever read. The two stately volumes contain a wonderful wealth of illustrations, the most alluring of which are reproductions of crayon sketches and Paget colour photographs. Nobody who loves to hear of adventurous living should miss reading this.

For all the praise, early sales were disappointing. Perhaps it was the lack of an individually-signed ‘collector’s edition’, or at the other end, the lack of a one-volume popular edition. But the greatest culprit, as Mawson rightly noted, was the outbreak of war.

With Europe at war and Australians and New Zealanders joining an imperial landing at Gallipoli, Mawson arrived back in Australia a father. Paquita had given birth to a baby girl, Patricia, on 13 April 1915. Mawson settled back into teaching at the University of Adelaide.

When he was in England late in 1914, Mawson had written to the Admiralty asking that members of the AAE be awarded the prestigious King’s Polar Medal, reminding the lords that ‘more than half the members of the land party… are now wearing khaki… and the acquisition of the medal would be of immediate value to them’.

But the bureaucratic wheels turned slowly. The King approved the award in February 1915, but the medals were not forwarded to the War Office for distribution until the end of 1915.

Besides the King’s Polar Medal, Mawson was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s highest honour, the Founder’s Gold Medal. He was ‘tremendously pleased’, Paquita later recorded.

Mawson represented his university at a conference called by the prime minister, William (‘Billy’) Hughes, to establish a Bureau of Science and Industry – the forerunner to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Early in 1916 he was active in the bureau’s first, momentous executive meetings, in which the organisation’s charter and operational procedures were established.